https://www.dhakatribune.com/op-ed/2022/03/04/war-and-peace
“Kings are the slaves of history,” wrote Leo Tolstoy in *War and Peace*, his 1869 literary masterpiece that recalls the French invasion of Russia, and its socio-cultural aftermath as Napoleonic ideas penetrated Tsarist society. Tolstoy’s famously sprawling novel – my Oxford World Classics paperback runs over 1300 pages – is filled with insights of special relevance to this very moment, as Vladimir Putin’s troops continue to push forward into Ukraine. Here, another famous line comes to mind: “the strongest of all warriors are these two – time and patience.” As we are all aware, neither attribute is readily evident in our glimpses of the battlefield since Russia commenced invading its neighbour on February 24. Instead, our newspapers, televisions and smartphones are inundated with misinformation, propaganda, and cynical manipulation of social media that makes it very hard to detect what’s really at stake. In this regard, there are only few undeniable facts bearing closer examination, as the world tries to figure its way out of an increasingly unpredictable predicament, which darkened even further after the Russian president evoked the spectre of nuclear warfare. Primary amongst these data points, from our point of view in South Asia, is the unanimous abstention earlier this week by India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, from the United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, where 141 countries voted yes (including our smaller regional neighbours of Bhutan, Afghanistan, Maldives and Nepal). This collective refusal to toe the line peddled by the West has drawn its own firestorm of moralist criticism, with India bearing the brunt. As the superb historian and author (and former military man) Srinath Raghavan pointed out after one particularly sententious fusillade, these “overwrought” admonitions are “useful reminder that the language of strategy and interests is usually reserved for analysing the actions and choices of the great powers, while the language of morality and principles is deployed for the rest.” Many other similarly useful reminders of bigotry, racism and hypocritical double-standards keep emerging, including the stupendously ahistorical accusation that Russia has brought war back to Europe for the first time since WWII. It is as though NATO didn’t bomb Serbia for 78 days in 1999, and the Bosnian genocide doesn’t count since (Muslim) Bosniaks aren’t quite as suitably “blond and blue-eyed” as the Ukrainians whose sufferings the west now stirs itself to bemoan. As the outstandingly perceptive American journalist, author and academic Howard French – his latest book is the instant classic *Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War* – put it on Twitter: “All of this blather asking how could such violent events be visited upon civilized Europe. To think how much mental energy it must take to suppress memory of the fact that Europe has repeatedly been the scene of the greatest barbarity in [the] last century.” Writing for *The Telegraph*, the acclaimed historian Ramachandra Guha summarized the situation highly pertinently. Comparing the Russian assault on Ukraine to “American misadventures in Vietnam and Iraq and the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan”, he noted that each episode “ended badly, causing enormous suffering in the country that was subject to invasion, a loss of prestige for the invader, and negative ripple effects across the world.” All that is happening anew at warp speed in 2022, with implications far beyond any that Vladimir Putin – or indeed NATO – might have anticipated. “Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion has changed everything,” writes the historian Adam Tooze in *The New Statesman*, because the West “expected sanctions to be delivered as punishment in a postwar situation with Ukraine crushed, humiliated and occupied.” When that didn’t happen quickly, writes Tooze, the “spectacle of self-empowerment changed the geopolitical calculus. The EU, NATO and individual states made choices [which] would have previously been unthinkable [and] applied sanctions that were never previously considered. The freezing of Russia’s central bank reserves means crossing the Rubicon. It brings conflict to the heart of the international monetary system. If the central bank reserves of a G20 member entrusted to the accounts of another G20 central bank are not sacrosanct, nothing in the financial world is. We are at financial war.” These kinds of moves can be significant, like Airbus and Boeing announcing they would halt maintenance and service for Russian airlines, or silly, like the University of Milan’s absurd “de-platforming” of Fyodor Dostoevsky. But taken as a whole, they indicate the growing global consensus – including here in South Asia – that Putin’s gambit in Ukraine cannot be allowed to succeed, despite the west’s weak-kneed cavilling. “Humanity has reached an inflection point,” says Admiral Arun Prakash, one of India’s most highly decorated and distinguished naval officers. Over the telephone, this 77-year-old former Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee told me that “after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which Francis Fukuyama thought was going to be “the end of the history” we have now come to another vital crossroads.” Prakash cited the Thucydidean dictum (interestingly, the historian of ancient Athens was also an experienced military man) that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” to make his case that an alternative has to prevail, and whatever gains Putin manages to achieve in Ukraine will necessarily need to be rolled back no matter how unlikely that scenario might seem at this juncture. “I think Putin has miscalculated,” says Prakash, “and Russia will pay a big price, which includes personal damage to his own standing. What is more, it has to happen that way, otherwise it will be open season for any country to simply walk over their neighbours when they feel like it. What we see here, once again, is that nothing justifies regime change in this manner – even if the west has done it with impunity before – and the effect will be absolutely chilling if Russia manages to get away with it right now. It would be a recipe for the world as we know it to dissolve into chaos.”
